Knapsack: The season of life

You pluck weeds in the cracks on your driveway and between the fading hosta, and a few days later they’re back as large as when you last pulled them.

Along the sidewalk, you see a brownish patch that you realize is in motion, and from closer, it’s an ant colony in some sort of civic turmoil, with hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands on the move.

The lawn is still needing regular mowing, not as much as this soggy spring but still quite often; no matter what your chemical predilections, the edges and odd patches are still showing up filled with anomalous plants which erupt in different shades of green and at odd angles, even after the mower chops them down.

Bushes are sending out wild shoots, and even the boxwood threatens to take up a new shape, irregular and expanding. And the foliage of the trees is dense and thick and shimmering in the evening light, with little illumination piercing the canopy where the branches arc overhead.

Driving down the roads, there are corners and houses and whole hillsides invisible behind jagged billowing banks of leaves, borne by branches from above bending down and exploding up out of shrubbery and ground cover.

There’s the orderly life of farm fields, monocultural rows of green growing corn higher than any elephant’s eye stretching to the horizon and bouncing back towards your car. High crops or the lower beans and even gardens are wide and full and full of life. The tomatoes are starting to add their red accents, but the leaves are perhaps never more wide and thick and green and heavy with a scent that stays on your hands when you handle the plants.

But no more than the basil, which is starting to be ready to be plucked and washed and converted into its true destiny, which is pesto. I almost hate to wash my hands after picking basil, which if I play my cards right, I can do three or four times off of each plant.

Because there is an arc to this season of life. We approach the season of harvest. Life and growth and verdance is at its peak; this is part of the reason why the Ohio State Fair is on now and the Hartford Fair for our area next week. Fields have had hay mown off of them once already, but we are at a point of repose now, which will quickly turn into the time of reaping the rewards of cultivating life these last few months.

Soon enough the combines and harvesters will be in the fields, the leaves will start turning and contracting, and the hues of green will begin to fade. But for now, it is the season of life. Look for it, revel in it, take life from it one leaf at a time.

Maybe in pesto form.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he’s not much of a gardener, but he loves his herbs. Deer, not so much. Tell him what’s growing in your lawn at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.